Prayer for the Day

by Revd Canon David White

9th November 2025 - Remembrance Sunday

Tongue of God, keep on speaking,
so that the peoples of earth
may speak your language to each other
and all may hear you in their own.
Speak peace where nations meet,
justice where ideas clash,
mercy where power reigns,
healing where minds and bodies hurt,
and love where churches seek your unity,
and wherever else Babel drowns out the sound of Pentecost.

On this Remembrance Sunday, this prayer for peace by the United Reformed Church Minister, Graham Cook, has language and the words we speak as its focus. The prayer asks God to influence our speaking so that we may speak his language of peace, justice, mercy, love and unity. That way we are more likely to avoid war and achieve peace and reconciliation.

Winston Churchill is wrongly attributed with saying “jaw, jaw is better than war, war”. It was actually Harold Macmillan who used the phrase in 1958. What Churchill actually said, in 1954, was, “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”. In other words, we should always seek dialogue over armed conflict. Dialogue allows nations, communities and individuals to express their thoughts, concerns and desires with one another so as to find common ground – the very basis on which the United Nations was established.

The last line of the prayer warns us against Babel drowning “out the sound of Pentecost”. Pentecost reversed the effects of the Tower of Babel, of which God disapproved and by which he confused people’s language. Pentecost requires nations and individuals put aside the Babel based instincts of pride and wrongful ambition and instead, in the cause of peace, talk to each other.